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The good 100 years – the impact of data in the quality of life

Article posted on: December 5, 2016

(HealthTech Wire / Interview) – Advances in medical care have helped to extend life expectancy, yet the quality of life patients live is not necessarily better. With an aging society, healthcare organisations need to look after older people for longer – and this means delivering better patient care, for longer. So how can we improve life quality and ensure people have a good 100 years?We speak to Michael Graetz, VP Healthcare EMEA Sales, Enterprise Content Division, at Dell EMC, to find out.

Precision medicine, patient expectations, data security requirements and health system reforms are all changing the way healthcare is delivered. This has led to an omni-channel approach, in the aim to help enhance the patient experience. With more touch points than ever before – including, patient portals, mobile apps, social media, telemedicine devices and wearable apps – healthcare organisations have significant amounts of data about a person, however, they are still unsure how to put this data to better use. This is particularly true now that omni-channel brings with it new data types and sources – from social care data, population health data, clinical research data, medical remove monitoring devices to fitness wearables, all typically stored in different formats and different locations.

It’s safe to say that there is still a long way to go for healthcare organisations to use data up to a full potential to patients advantage. Obtaining, managing data and understanding a patient’s entire medical history in order to get a consolidated view, is vital to offering better and more personalised healthcare services as well as improving efficiencies and even starting to look at more predictive models.

In order for healthcare organisations to benefit from data and improve patient care, they first need to get their house in order. One way organisations can manage data from this healthcare omni-channel environment, is through implementing an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution. Hosting data in a controlled and managed environment, will enable healthcare organisations to:

Extract the data – Having a single repository can help to pull both structured and unstructured data from different channels. It allows healthcare organisations to extract data from different areas of the business, breaking down the siloes and having a common platform for everyone to access. This opens up a way to apply new analytics algorithms in the area of image analytics and pattern matching, to detect early diseases risk even before those are reported. Early detection and treatment is a key to successful and cost effective care.

Manage and protect data – Within a controlled environment, healthcare organisations can apply privacy settings, giving authorised access to the right people who need it. We recently hosted Momentum Europe where a leader clinical research Hospital spoke about how they were keen to understand how better to collect data (in terms of the data that would be relevant to them) and when it should be collected. To help them with their digital transformation journey, they now have an ECM solution which has increased data quality accessed by clinical staff and has improved the timing of reports. As a result, they can now ensure quality control and access.

Archive data for governance and retention purposes – Currently, many organisations still use paper based flows. This means users might not be working on right or current document. This is hard to monitor, very labour intensive and expensive, given the long record retention requirements for regulated content in healthcare environments. This was the case of a leading pharmaceutical company, who after deploying an ECM solution, now have a central repository with anytime, anywhere access. The benefits include audit control, version control, indexing and classification, audit trails and compliance and process efficiency. Building a Research platform stack with lacking of that component will cause to data leakage and abuse of patient data. Governance of mass of clinical data that needs to be shared with innovative pharma and research institutes, require a proof that patient rights are not violated.

Analyse and apply the data – Through analysing this data, healthcare organisations can understand each patient and wider trends and derive value from it by then applying it. Our recent research with IDC revealed that 45 percent of organisations plan to deliver more integrated and personalised care. Only by applying this knowledge to different use cases will they be able to do so. Precision medicine will become more powerful as soon as more patients are treated and knowledge of genomic mutations, drugs resistance and effectiveness grows.

Through using data, healthcare organisations will be able to deliver more personalised patient care, and thus, improve the quality of life. Using data will help to increase our chances of finding more cures for chronic diseases and provide better services and outcomes for patients. Collecting data in a managed environment, from which it can be accessed and analysed, will be key to their digital transformation success.

Is your healthcare organisation struggling to make sense of its data? Please feel free to leave comments below.

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DELL EMC’s solutions deliver a complete patient-centric view of information beyond the electronic patient record - regardless of source, location or format across the continuum of care. Whether transitioning to or looking to achieve the full value of your EPR, DELL EMC Integrated Patient Record solutions enhance existing patient information by aggregating, sharing and optiming patient information from any health information application or content format.